Research For The Orphan's Song Plus Writing For Adults Vs. Teens with Lauren Kate

July 1, 2019 Mindy McGinnis

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Mindy: Welcome to Writer, Writer Pants On Fire. Where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing industry, marketing, and more. I'm your host Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at MindyMcGinnis.com and make sure to visit the Writer, Writer Pants On Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques, and more at writerwriterpantsonfire.com

Mindy: Today's guest is Lauren Kate, the number one New York Times and internationally bestselling author of the Fallen novels, the Teardrop novels and The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages. Kate joined me today to talk about the inspiration for her newest adult historical, The Orphan’s Song.

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Mindy: We're here talking about The Orphan's Song by Lauren Kate which is a historical, it is set in Venice in 1736. So I was curious about why that location and that specific time period?

Lauren: The story kind of jumped out at me. I was on a book tour for another novel about three, four years ago. I was in Venice and I was returning one night from an event to the apartment where I was staying with my husband and my two really little children at the time and I was trying to get home to them and I ended up getting really lost, which if you've ever been to Venice, it's just kind of like a rite of passage as a tourist there. I found myself before this big building, this stone compound called The Hospital of the Incurables and all the streets surrounding this building were named for it: The alley of the Incurables and the Bridge of the Incurables, and there was just something so content and romantic about the sound of that name.

Lauren: I wanted to know what the building was and who the incurables had been. So I did a little bit of research on that trip and the stuff that I found out about this place, it drew me in so completely. For about 500 years, starting in the 15th century until the fall of the republic, which happens at the end of the 17th century, this building was an orphanage for families and children who were trained to become musicians who played instruments and sang in the church choir. And in the era of my novel, which is like the middle of the 18th century, like 1737 they are the most famous musicians in the world. So not only are these orphan girls attracting like the best maestros and composers to write music and teach them like Vivaldi, - Vivaldi, got his career teaching these orphan girls - they are also like a tourist destination.

Lauren: If you're a wealthy gentleman in England, when you come of age, you go on something called the grand tour, go to Rome to see the Vatican. You go to Florence to see the David and then you go to Venice to hear the orphans sing. They were kind of rock stars of their day. I loved the idea of these children with unfortunate and heartbreaking circumstances rising to prominence and wealth and extreme musical prowess. I was struck by one element. Joining the choir as one of these girls, you had to sign an oath that basically signed your life away to the church. You are not allowed to leave the church. If you became a member of the choir, you weren't allowed to step outside the walls of the compound, but for I think three or four times a year where they would go to just different churches and sing.

Lauren: If you ever left the orphanage to get married or anything else, you could never sing or perform music again. That part of you belonged to the church. So of course I'm thinking about the rebel girl for whom that's just completely untenable and feels very stifling. She's got to find her way to resist this and break free.

Mindy: So it's kind of like a cult in some ways.

Lauren: In some ways it is because there was such a draw to become one of these musicians. It was the best thing that could happen to you if you were an orphan. I mean that was the highest you could rise. You could rise really well above your station, you could make a lot of money, and you're getting love letters from famous people from all around the world and there were limits to it. There just wasn't a lot of personal freedom.

Mindy: You are talking about these orphans being brought into this lifestyle and perhaps this didn't come into your research, but I'm curious, what about the orphans that did not have any musical talent?

Lauren: They were resigned to a much drearier life. They still often stayed at the orphanage until they were about 40 years old. At which point they quote unquote retired to a nunnery. They would sew the garments for the girls in the choir. They would prepare their meals, serve as the nurses to the babies who would grow up to become girls in the choir. The whole focus of the work in the orphanage was to further the musical careers of this select group of girls. There was an audition process and if you didn't make it, you were stuck doing the drudge work for the rest of your life.

Mindy: So like support staff for the choir.

Lauren: Exactly.

Mindy: You mentioned getting love letters then from famous people basically, fans as well. I'm assuming then that there is a sexual element that can come into play then with these young girls, yet they are in many ways the property of the church. So how is that juggled?

If you're a wealthy gentleman in England, you go on something called The Grand Tour. You go to Rome to see the Vatican. You go to Florence to see the David and then you go to Venice to hear the orphans sing..png

Lauren: In this era, first of all, it was considered really uncouth to perform on a stage. Like opera singers were kind of in the same sphere as prostitutes. It was not a noble thing to do even though people love to go see the opera. You didn't want your daughter to grow up and be an opera singer if you were in the upper class, except for these girls because of the way the church restricted every aspect of their lives, they were considered very pure, very holy, like they were singing in the image of the vestal virgins. They were protected when they would step into the church to sing. They sang in an elevated balcony that overlooked the church and it was protected by like a brass grate decorated with all sorts of flowers and blossoms and fruit, which really was meant to serve as a protector from the male gaze of churchgoers.

Lauren: They wanted to be heard but not seen, but you could arrange a meeting if you wanted to marry one of them and you were wealthy. You could arrange a meeting with like the prioress of the church and she would let you come and you know, talk to the girl and see if you liked her. Again, not a lot of freedom for most of these women who grew up in this church, but this was an extremely hedonistic era in Venice masquerades and decadent parties that would sometimes go on for months and everybody's wearing masks all the time. Like not just to parties, but just going about your day and going to buy a piece of fish for dinner in the market. You're wearing a mask. It was a time of like decadence and anonymity and really wild, all sorts of wild activities. So these girls are an anomaly in this era because they were so pious and so sheltered. Again, that's going to drive a couple of them crazy and send them sneaking out into the middle of the night and seeing what else they can find in Venice.

Mindy: Wow, that's fascinating. So in the book there's this wonderful dichotomy between what their lives are like as the choir members and as these girls that are very much the images of the vestal virgins and the pious singers. Then also they're existing in this world that is very sexual in many ways and it's a really wonderful dichotomy between those two worlds, these girls - the ones that are sneaking out - then are bridging. Talk about that for a little bit, how they are processing that as characters.

Lauren: Okay, so Violetta she's the main, um, she's the female protagonist in the story. There are several nights where she sneaks out and one of the first nights she joins up with sort of band of revelers on the street and they lead her to this masquerade where she enters into this like a really codified process of celebrating a night. There were certain kinds of masks that you would wear for certain kinds of evenings you wanted to have. There was a mask called the moretta, which was an entirely black mask with two holes for the eyes and nothing for the mouth. There was no ribbon that attached this mask to the back of the head the way most most masks, you know, you picture, they're just tied on the back of your head. This one had no ribbon. It stayed affixed to the face because on the inside of the mouth there was a black button and the person who wore this mask was only women.

Lauren: The woman who wore this mask bit on the button to keep it in place. So not only was your face hidden, but you were rendered basically fully mute the whole evening. And when I first learned about that, it made me feel suffocated. It felt like how restrictive, what subjugation. I was talking to the Venetian historian who led me through Venice when I was doing a lot of my research and she said, no, no, this was considered extremely erotic for them because the voice was something to be protected, something to be valued. You didn't share it, you didn't speak just to anyone. It was something that you only did when you were very intimate with someone. So you might dance with any number of men at a masquerade, but you're only going to drop that mask if you're ready to share your voice, your face, your everything was someone.

Mindy: Oh, that's fascinating. I like it. And of course a lovely parallel between their voice when they're singing.

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean for Violetta especially, she is trying to really go under cover, she doesn't want anyone to hear her voice, so she is quite tempted by the lure of the moretta mask.

Mindy: Coming up, what differences, if any, there are in writing for the adult versus the ya market.

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Mindy: You also write at least two truly historical characters in The Orphan’s Song. There is Vivaldi as well as another composer. You say that you took your characters names actually from the roles of the students, is that correct?

Lauren: Obviously we have lots of information. We have Vivalid's music and we have his biography. We have a lot about him, but these women for as famous as they were in their era, history overlooked them. And so to go back and search through these archives, they're orphans so that you know you can't even trace their families, but they were known by their first name and the instrument that they played. So people would, if you're going to go to Venice and see these orphans, you'd say, I'm going to go hear Laura of the Violin or Anna of the Oboe, Violetta of the Angel's Voice. These were names that I came across flipping through these big old archives and I just, I wanted to bring them to life.

Mindy: So, so cool. The research involved when writing about an actual historical person, whether it's Vivaldi or anyone, really when you're writing about a person that is fairly well known in the average reader's mind when it comes to someone who is already famous - any reservations about writing about a real person?

Lauren: Yes, and I think that that's probably why Vivaldi is a shadow figure in the novel. We never really see him in the flesh. We do meet Nikola Porpora who was the maestro at the incurables. The reader is not intimate with him. The characters are not really intimate with him. I like the backbone of a historical novel. I like being able to do a lot of research and really situate a story within a world that was real. But I also like freedom for my characters to surprise me, and I know that if I have a real historical character that I'm writing up as a protagonist, I worry about that. I worry about how much freedom I would be able to let her have to surprise me to go left when I wanted her to go right. If I'm trying to adhere to like some real personal history, so there's something nice and freeing about having invented characters in a real historical setting.

Mindy: Yes, absolutely. When you're writing about a real person, you are, as you're saying, restricted by what you can have them do and where they can even be most times, especially if it's a very famous person, their lives have been researched so thoroughly that they can actually pin down where they were or where they probably were at any given time. You don't have the ability to even move them around a global map, perhaps the way that you want them to, and it restricts your own setting. It also restricts you in that you may have a reader that picks up this book because they are - not particularly this book - but picks up any book because they are interested in Vivaldi or whomever, and then when they pick up your book and you have a detail that is incorrect about their life. That reader that is going to either feel misled or definitely feel like you have perhaps not done your research.

Lauren: Yes. Yeah, and sometimes I think too about, right now I'm working on another book and it's set during the American civil war. Again with with the female characters for whom there's not a lot of documented history. I feel a sense of freedom but with male characters who were quite famous - one of the characters I'm writing about is a civil war general on the union side. I'm not writing about Ulysses S. Grant, his name is General Hooker, Joseph Hooker, so he's famous in some circles and lesser known in other circles, but I think you know he, he does have descendants who are carrying on his history in a specific way. You want to just do right by the history of these real people and that does, it limits what you can do with them.

Mindy: The restrictions in writing about a real human being. Those are a very real thing. So I wanted to ask you also about your YA novels. I myself am aa YA writer and you broke into YA in a very big way a few years back. So now that you are coming out with The Orphan's Song, which is an adult historical title, I just wondered about your process when it came to writing adult versus YA. How did you go about writing differently or did you not? Did you just write the story that you had inside of you?

Lauren: The latter. I just wrote the story. In some ways the processes is exactly the same. It's still very hard for me to get a first draft out. I still struggle with showing enough of the characters interiority, you know, the things that are challenging to me about writing are constant unfortunately. You know, I think one of the differences really, I would say the only difference between something that's geared for a YA audience and something that's not necessarily is the scope that the story will look at is going to be more focused in a YA novel. Even though The Orphan's Song has characters who are teenagers for much of the book, the book looks at a larger historical context and it looks at characters in different moments of their life than would be interesting to just a teen reader. As a writer of YA books, you'll understand this as well and probably some of the listeners who enjoy YA books understand this, but there's something really brilliant and focused about like the narcissism of being a teenager and like not caring at all about your mom's hopes and dreams and aspirations and as a writer that lets you get very close to one character's psyche, which I think can make a great, an enjoyable experience as a reader and a writer. I think it's just zooming out a little bit is the feeling of writing a non YA novel for me.

Mindy: Very cool. No, that makes absolute sense to me. I also was thinking in terms as I read the book, in terms of it being a historical for adults, I've often noticed in historical writing for adults that there is desire on the part of the readership, that particular readership, they like description more. They want to feel that investment of the surroundings, but also clothing from what I understand of the historical adult audience is that they like that description more than the traditional YA audience does.

Lauren: Yeah. I think my writing style, I'm sure it's changed, but I think it's always been maybe more descriptive in general anyway. You know, my young adult fantasy novels are quite, the setting of them is quite palpable. It's, is its own character and I spend a lot of time letting the protagonist inhabit like a very physical world that almost like sticks to your skin. I agree that like a lot of the YA novels I read, it's more about character and it's more about emotion.

Mindy: Why don't you tell us where listeners can find you online and maybe a little bit more about what you're working on right now.

Lauren: Yeah. So you can find me all over the place online. I'm on Twitter and Instagram at Lauren Kate books and Facebook, I think it's Lauren Kate author. My website is Lauren Kate books.net. I love to interact with readers and fellow book lovers online. So drop me a message or anybody out there listening. Yes. I spoke a little bit about what I'm working on now, but uh, in a nutshell, it's three prostitutes solving a mystery on the front lines of the civil war.

Mindy: That's so awesome. I'm here for that in a big way.

Lauren: Thank you, Mindy. This was wonderful. Thanks for having me.

Mindy: Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at www.writerwriterapantsonfire.com If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you, or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit www.writerwriterpantsonfire.com and click support the blog and podcast in the sidebar.

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Successful Indie Publishing With Aileen Erin

June 24, 2019 Mindy McGinnis

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Mindy: If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit writerwriterpantsonfire.com and click support the blog and podcast in the sidebar. Today's guest is Aileen Erin, who is half Irish, half Mexican and 100% nerd. From Star Wars to Star Trek. she geeks out on Tolkien's linguistics and has a severe fascination with the supernatural. Aileen has a BS in radio, TV and film from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University. She lives with her husband and daughter in Los Angeles. Aileen joined me today to talk about how to maintain a reader's interest - and her own - while writing an eight book series,

Mindy: So someone I know who is pretty much always right has told me that I should start telling some stories from my own life on the podcast. Because this person has been on multiple panels with me and she says that some of my stories should probably be used on the podcast. I'm going to try it out and if you would rather that I get right to you learning about the publishing industry, totally tell me. Otherwise I'm going to inform you about worm sex.

Mindy: One of the things I do a lot is school visits. I've been talking about my first book, Not A Drop To Drink for eight years now, doing school visits and talking in front of age ranges anywhere from seventh graders to seniors. I usually don't go much lower than that, but there was one time when I was in a sixth grade classroom and I had been presenting for the entire day, eight periods on my feet the whole time, talking for 45 minutes nonstop about writing and publishing, and particularly my book, Not A Drop To Drink. And in the process of talking about Not A Drop To Drink, one of the stories I tell is about my own eardrum breaking, because somewhere in the book a character's eardrum breaks and I had to talk about the pain of that experience and how a person would deal with that in a world where there aren't any painkillers. And then I tell them, and this is true, that if your eardrum breaks, it grows back. Your eardrum will regenerate and about two weeks. But in the meantime you are deaf in that ear. You are deaf until your eardrum grows back.

Mindy: It's a bizarre little thing and I always tell them it's just like earthworms. So when you've done a presentation a thousand times, usually you kind of do it rote. Your mind can kind of wander while you're doing it, which is typically what's going on with me. So my mind was wandering by the eighth time I had gone through my presentation on that day. I ended up talking about your eardrum breaking and regenerating and comparing it to a worm. If you were to cut a worm in half, which I don't encourage them to do, but if you were to cut a worm in half each section will go their separate ways, never to meet again. Which is how I usually phrase it But as my mind wandered and it was following what I was saying, I actually ended up thinking and saying, aloud, to a classroom of sixth graders, "but what if they did?"

Mindy: "What if they met and they fell in love? What if they met and they fell in love and they had children? It's not even incest. It's me.-cest." At which point I realize I'm speaking out loud. Look up. See the teacher standing in the back of the room looking at me like - you have made it all day without talking about worm sex. What happened? I don't know, but I do know that as I was driving home, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I ended up going home Googling worm sex, and learning a lot. Also, first of all, it isn't true that if you cut a worm in half, that both sections regenerate. Only the section with the brain regenerates. The tail cannot grow a new brain. The brain can grow a new tail. So nobody needs to tweet me and tell me that I'm totally wrong about worm regeneration. However, I can tell you with conviction - don't Google worm sex.

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Mindy: You are the author of the Alpha Girl Series an eight book series that began in 2013. So tell my listeners a little bit about how to maintain a storyline over that many books.

Aileen: I think the key to maintaining a storyline over a larger series is all about making sure that the characters are still evolving, still developing. I've also changed up some of the POV for different books. I think that's also helped keep reader interest. Some of the side characters have taken over their own novels and stuff like that, so that's been really key in not only keeping the reader's interest but keeping my own sanity going through through eight books.

Mindy: I was going to ask you that as a follow up. How do you keep yourself interested through eight books? And I love the idea of changing up the point of view because if you change the point of view, you change the story. If you see something from someone else's perspective, it comes off differently. So have you found that to be your experience then when you're working on a series that lasts for that long?

Aileen: Yes, I really loved it doing the side characters. I originally did Bruja, that's from Tessa. It's the main character in the first three books. It's all from her point of view, but then I needed a little bit of a break, so Bruja from her cousin's point of view, and that really changed up how I saw the series and how I saw the world. It really expanded the world in a nice way and open up the possibility that then Tessa's best friend could have her own book and now another friend has their own book, Lunar Court Book Eight is, also dual POV, which is not something that I've done with any of the other books, but both characters in it that are going to fall in love and get together were big side characters from the series as a whole. So I was like, okay, they both deserve their own book, but this is actually just one story. So that was really fun for me to do. Some of them are witches, some of them are werewolves, some of them are fae. So kind of getting those different perspectives really keeps it fresh for me, which I think helps keep it fresh for the readers.

Mindy: Personally, when I was a kid, I was always into the sidekicks. I always liked Robin more than Batman and so on and so forth. It just, it didn't matter what the show was or the book was. I was always interested in sidekicks and I wanted to know more about the sidekicks. So I think that that's really cool that you can go into the same world and expand the books and the world, but also at the same time you're shrinking it down more by focusing more intently on a character that before didn't have her own voice.

Aileen: I used to be a big Buffy watcher when I was in high school. I love Buffy. I also wanted to know more about like Angel who eventually got his own show and then um, Willow. I wanted to know more about her and what she was doing with magic. And I always wondered what happened with Oz, who was a werewolf on the show who ended up leaving. I want to know more about what everybody else is doing too. So I get to do that in my own series, which is really, really fun.

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Mindy: So you have a new series coming out. The first book is titled Off Planet. So tell us a little bit more about this series, the new one and do you plan for it to have as many books as your Alpha Girl series has?

Aileen: Off Planet I started writing during my MFA. I had a really fun time world-building imagining a future earth and what it would look like, what would happen to the government and to corporations and their role in government. And I kind of really ran with that idea and I had a lot of fun writing this space opera. I have always planned on it to be shorter, three or four books I guess, depending on reader interest, maybe I'll expand it. I kind of want to keep it a little bit more contained so I can't decide if it's going to be three or four books yet. I'm in the middle of writing book too, so I'll have to see.

Mindy: Sounds like you're more of a pantser than a planner. Is that true?

Aileen: I'm a minimal planner. I'm like a plantser. I love Blake Snyder's Save The Cat, his little breakdown of story. So I do like 40 note cards and like 13 really basic ideas before I jump into the next. With my Alpha Girl series, I'm not really sure which book I'm going to do until I'm like towards the end of writing the current book that I'm on. I've got so many different side characters where I can go off and tell their different stories. In Off Planet Lorne and Maité, they're kind of so central to the story. I don't know if I would spin off and do the other ones, but I can't completely say that I wouldn't. So for their story, for Lorne and Maité, this story, I think it's like three or four books.

Mindy: So you have dealt pretty deeply into urban fantasy, obviously with eight books in a series. And um, now Sci-Fi with three or, or four, is that where you're comfortable writing is in genre areas?

Aileen: I'm more comfortable writing in genre areas cause that's what I like to read more. That's where my interests lie. Like write what you know, but I don't know anything about space travel. It's kind of more write what you love and that's kind of what I love. I always like a little, um, if I'm reading like a romance novel, I want it to have a hint of paranormal or Scifi or something or reading, YA, it's more likely that I'm reading something paranormal or Scifi or fantasy. I love epic fantasy. I hope to one day write an epic fantasy high fantasy series. So that's kind of in the backburner though.

Mindy: I read widely, I love to read. I'll read pretty much anything. My writing then as you were saying, follows that vein. I will write anything because I will read anything. And you do tend to focus on the things that you love. I get frustrated as a reader and as a writer at how genre writing gets looked down upon often, not just from writers but also readers. Uh, you know, some readers would never touch a fantasy book or would never touch Sci-Fi because they think that that is just for fantasy readers, pr just for Sci-Fi readers and they're not dipping their toes into all of the different wells of books that are waiting around everywhere. So do you find that same experience that genre books don't seem to get the respect that non-genre writing does?

Aileen: To some extent, yes. Genre tends to get a bad rap, not taken as seriously, I guess. I went to a genre fiction writing MFA. We talked a lot about genre fiction versus literary fiction. I kind of don't mind writing in genre. I think it's what's fun. I love it. I love the escapism of it. Somebody that reads only literary doesn't want to read my book, then I'm like, that's just not the book for them. Um, there's so many books out there, so many different kinds of readers out there, and if they like more literary stuff, then great. I'm glad that they're reading. I gravitate towards genre. I love genre. It's so fun

Mindy: Being glad that they're reading. I'm with you on that. I've used to work in a high school in a library. We had drug dogs come through and one of our student's lockers pinged the dogs and they got upset and so they searched the locker and they did find drugs, but they also found a copy of 50 Shades of Grey and they brought it down to me for whatever reason and they put it on the counter and they're like, do you think it's appropriate for her to have this book? And I was like, oh, she had a book! Like I was just so happy.

Aileen: Yes, they're reading fantastic. Who Cares? Exactly.

Mindy: I was like, yeah, give that back to her. She is going to need that when she is in juvenile detention.

Aileen: Oh yeah, yeah. I get a lot of emails from readers saying like, I hadn't really enjoyed reading in school. I didn't, I haven't been loving it, but now I've read your book and I'm back into reading and I love it. I'm like, that is the best compliment ever. I love it. Welcome to the world of magical books. I love it.

Mindy: Coming up, urban fantasy is dead in traditional publishing, but a smart indie writer can make a decent living at it.

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Mindy: When we talk about traditional publishing. that world kind of burned out on genre awhile ago with the vampire trend leading into an urban fantasy trend, and then just there was a conflagration. Everything was urban fantasy for so long and the traditional publishing world still hasn't recovered from that. They're still insisting that urban fantasy is dead. I have definitely heard whispers that maybe it's coming back, but I'm not seeing the rush for that genre yet, and I think it would be difficult to be querying with an urban fantasy right now. I don't think the traditional publishing gatekeepers are welcoming it yet. But your rankings, especially for Alpha Girl and the success that you've had with that series, which is urban fantasy, says that the readers are there, that they want it. So do you have any thoughts about that?

Aileen: Yeah, I really don't think that agents and acquiring editors want to hear anything about vampires, werewolves, anything paranormal, urban fantasy, they're so sick and tired it. Which is why I did not ever even attempt to go traditional because back in 2013 when I was starting the Alpha Girl series and figuring out kind of in 2012 even figuring out what I was going to do with the series and this book that I had written in my MFA. I was going to RWA national convention and listening to different agents and editors talk about what they were wanting to hear, what they were needing, what they saw a market for and Twilight and all the movies had already come out. So they had seen so many manuscripts that were vampires and werewolves and teens, and they were like, if you send us one more of those books, I'm gonna vomit.

Aileen: I can't read one. I don't like it. I don't want to read it. I'm tired of it. I was like, okay, that's all well and good, but there's this whole readership of people that hadn't been reading urban fantasy before. I had been reading urban fantasy for a while, but they hadn't been, and were introduced by Twilight and now this ravenous mob were wanting more urban fantasy, more werewolves, more vampires. The publishing powers that be just said, no, I don't want it. Well, what about all these people that were reading it? They didn't all of a sudden go away. That desire to read that kind of fiction didn't just disappear. I decided to do it my own way. I formulated a business plan, release schedule, researched indie. I got a distribution partner that would help push my books to retailers and help represent me a little bit.

Aileen: I found it the case that there were so many bloggers, so many readers, so many fans of werewolves in particular and urban fantasy in general that I was pretty much welcomed into the space and I found a tremendous readership that slowly built over the course of the first three releases. By the time I hit the third I made the USA Today list. So I do think that there are a lot of readers out there that still want to read it, but it's interesting that like the gatekeepers kind of get tired of a genre and then just call it done. There's plenty more out there to be done with the genre and plenty of readers out there that actually still want that genre.

Mindy: Twilight and everything that came after created monsters and they're still hungry. They want to read those books and there are people that that's all they want to read. And like we said earlier, that's fine. You read whatever you want to read and people like you are perfectly happy to write it and get it into their hands and you're rewarded for that. And I think it's wonderful. I myself have an urban fantasy that has been under my bed for 15 years because I'm just waiting for the traditional market to come back around to where they are welcoming it again and I do think that it will happen, but in the meantime I think there's a lot of opportunity out there for people like yourself that are writing what they love and you're going to give it to the readers that love it.

Aileen: I think there's a market out there and it kind of opened me up to like a waiting audience that were ready for me and built the way so that now when I switch off to a different genre, they followed me over there and I did pretty well with that one. And then I'll grow that. And then um, I have like this audience and this fan base readership that is ready to read whatever I want to write, which is an amazing gift. Just by going in through urban fantasy, I was able to kind of like unlock a little door and get my foot in. I guess I'm against traditional a little bit. I'm like, you're not the boss of me. I'm gonna do what I want.

Mindy: Yeah, and that's totally fine. That's totally fine. Obviously you've had tremendous success with it, so good for you. I personally am just terrified at the idea of setting up your own business plan, but let's talk about that for a little bit. You are the CEO of Ink Monster, which is your publisher, and I know a little bit from reading online about how the company came to be with your fellow authors. If you can tell the listeners a little bit about how Ink Monster came to be.

Aileen: I finished my MFA. I had heard all this news about how nobody wanted anything that was urban fantasy, so I had this manuscript and I was like, well, I don't know what I'm going to do, But all the while I was in my MFA. I was researching publishing. I got Publishers Weekly, I got Writer's Digest. I was reading the emails that I got every week from Publishers Weekly about the latest in Indie and there was this big push of indie authors that were making it big, making a very, very good living by going and doing it themselves. So I started to put together an idea of how I would kind of go outside the box and I saw that there were a lot of indie authors that were not kind of dealing with the business side. If you're going to go indie you have to have the business locked down.

Aileen: What's Your Business Plan? What's your structure? How are you going to break even? What are you going to spend on marketing? What's your release schedule? What you know, when are you going to do cover reveals? Who's going to do the covers? Are they gonna look good? Who's going to do the graphic design? What's your social media plan like? All of these like millions of things kind of create this bigger image that is your, your business and your branding. I got together with another author who has since left Ink Monster. She had a business background in marketing. So we got together and she was like, look, you have a lot of knowledge about the publishing industry. I have some about marketing, let's give it a go. So we got together, we kind of worked back and forth for about a year on our business plan before we entered into a deal with our distributor.

Aileen: We gave them our business model, what we were planning, who our niche audience was going to be, how we were going to reach them, and they took a chance on us. That kind of evolved into what became Ink Monster. We added on some other authors for a little while and then my business partner left, started her own thing, and I've kind of weeded out a little bit of my authors because it ended up being so much time to develop other authors and it was taking away my writing time and kind of the reason why I decided to go into is because I love to write and I wanted to write whatever I wanted to write. I loved all that control. I wanted all that control of the covers and kind of the marketing and that kind of thing. I found myself to be a total control freak, but it is a lot of work. So it's not for everyone. Everything that you would want to publisher to do everything that you would expect them to do. You have to do that when you're indie.

Mindy: So you're talking about getting a distributor and things like that. Is that to ensure that your book ends up on the shelves of bookstores like Barnes and Noble or chain?

Aileen: At first I started with just digital distribution with Inscribed. They eventually got bought out by IPG. IPG does now handle my print. I went into a bigger print distribution to be in stores and Barnes and Nobles and stuff like that with Off Planet. I didn't do that with any of my Alpha Girl books. I'm such an e-reader. I've found most of my sales with the Alpha Girl books have been at least 90% e-readers. E-books, various devices. I'm giving print a try with Off Planet and we'll see how it goes, and if I keep doing that. They handle all of that. They also handle with e-books, they have weekly meetings with iBooks or I guess now Apple Books, Amazon get us good placement there or deals, kindle daily deals and stuff like that. We're allowed to like apply for those kinds of things. Having that person that has that connection that "in" with those retailers and can get you good placement and good spots, um, get you in banners and stuff like that. Those are the, the keys.

Mindy: I'm interested in what you're saying about e-reading versus print. My own experience through talking with other authors, the Indie market readers are traditionally going to be e-readers and that is good news because that's less overhead for you. You don't have to worry about printing, you don't have to worry about buying the physical copies and flipping them. You don't have to worry about that overhead. So have you found that to be true then that it's the uh, the e-books is where your money is gonna come from?

Aileen: Absolutely. Ebooks have been, I want to say more than 90% of my income. That's great because it is very low risk. I mean I don't even need anybody to make my files for me. It's no overhead for that print. For Off Planet there was, I, I had to buy a couple thousand copies of the print book, had to get them printed. That was like a whole rigmarole knowing my history of really selling well through E. I'm not sure how the print is going to pan out, but it's a Book One. So it's something to try for sure. So, and I am in Barnes and Noble and other bookstores throughout the US. I am always testing things and trying out new ways to advertise to market. New formatting and stuff like that. Being indie means I get to try all those kinds of things.

Mindy: One of the things I noticed right away about your Alpha Girl series was the number of reviews that you have on Amazon. Um, and that's, that's a big factor. People look at that, they look at that number of reviews, whether they're good or bad, it's that number and they say, oh, people are reading this book. So how do you go about getting that amount of reviews?

Aileen: We started out from the very beginning using Net Galley to send out arcs. For whatever reason, that first Becoming Alpha, my first book, I put it on NetGalley and we had to shut it down from NetGalley after just like three days because it had so many downloads. And that was really, really fantastic because we did get a lot of reviews from that first few days on NetGalley. From that we built our NetGalley email list. So, um, when you are on NetGalley, you're allowed to capture emails of those reviewers and those bloggers. So I have built an extensive list over the course of all these series. Anybody who has requested an InkMonster book, I can email all of them. "Hey, we have this new release here is your instant download code on NetGalley. You're pre-approved code, click on it, please download it and we'd love your review, you know, good, bad, whatever."

Aileen: And then we remind them because you can't post a review on Amazon before release day. So on release day we email everybody that we go through and download the list of who requested and got a copy of the newest release and we email that whole list saying, "Hey, you downloaded a copy of the book, today's release day. We would absolutely love and appreciate if you would post your review." And we provide links to every retailer and GoodReads. A lot of people take us up on that just by saying please and thank you. You get a lot of response from that.

Mindy: That's incredibly smart. I love it. I'm listening and I'm taking notes.

Mindy: Lastly, the Indie experience at BookCon and how to market without big publisher push behind you.

Mindy: You had told me you just got back from BookCon. So what are those big events like when you're an Indie, what are your purposes when you go there? What are your goals and how do you go about achieving them?

Aileen: This was the first time that I've done anything like this I have to say and it went so well, much better than any of my expectations. Um, I haven't been able to go because I have a three year old and my husband works in movies. So we're constantly on location, moving all over the place. But this time the timing worked out and I was able to go so I was super stoked. My main goal from going to BookCon was to gain new readers. Um, I took Off Planet with me. I took a hundred copies. I set up in my distributors booth. IPG has this giant booth with a thing hanging from the ceiling. I don't go and get my own separate little booth that's in the back. I am working out of theirs because I feel like that gives you a little bit of a boost.

Aileen: I brought 100 copies just to give away and to sign just to gain new readers. I had a little stack of download codes for the first book and my Alpha Girl series as well and little mini books that are like almost index card size of Off Planet that I printed for anybody that wanted to take one for a friend. It's just a sample. It's got like five chapters in, it looks like a teeny, teeny tiny bitty baby book. It's cute. So I took those as well. And Ink Monster pins, enamel pins I just want to reach new readers. I've got this great fan base for my Alpha Girl series and a lot of them crossed over with me to read Off Planet, which is phenomenal and amazing because it's a totally different genre. But I knew that there was a lot more readers that I could reach.

Aileen: So just by having that one person that's going to take my book, then might tell their friends, oh, I read this new book. And so then they'll tell their friends and they'll tell their friends. So that's kind of the goal. I didn't know how many people were gonna show up for my signing. You just never know with that, so I left and walked away. As soon as I got there, I saw one author that was doing a signing and it wasn't going so hot. So I walked away. I was not going to worry about it. I'm going to come back. So then I came back about 20 minutes later and there was this giant line. My reps were opening up all the boxes and like running around like crazy and I was like, what's happening? And they were like, there are so many people here for you.

Aileen: I don't think we have enough books. I'm going to start handing them out and then telling the rest of them that they can go because your a hundred books are up. 15 minutes before the signing started, all the books were gone. Hopefully a lot of those readers were new to me. They hadn't read any of my books. A couple of them said they had read all of my Alpha Girl books, which I was like, fantastic. I'm so happy to have met you. And gave them an Off Planet book. Most of them are all new. So that's readership that's growing. And that was kind of my goal was to show some new readers some love and gain their attention.

Mindy: And when it comes to something like that, when you're at an event and you're letting people know you're going to be signing, so you had a great turnout and I'm sure the distributor was helping to make sure that people were aware that you were giving away free books, but to have a line like that, that's really good. So what did you do to raise awareness of the fact that you would be there? That you were there at that time and you were giving away free books?

Aileen: I posted on social media of course tagged the event, #BookCon and hashtagged it like crazy. I had been telling everybody across social media for a while that I was going to be there. I had a few people contact me ahead of time. I had zero expectations. I was like, it could be 10 people that show up and that's 10 readers, so that's great. I was also, I think printed in the handout and my distributor also printed all the signings that were going to happen at their booth in a little flyer. So they were handing that out and had my time on there. We had a sign printed, but it was, I think they put it up maybe an hour before. It wasn't like a ton. I guess they saw the cover, they liked the cover. A lot of people were asking me about the Latina main character. My mother is Mexican, so a lot of my series, both Off Planet and Alpha Girl has a lot of like Latin influences, so they were really interested in that. Somehow. All of those things I think work to my advantage and got me a really great turnout

Mindy: And that's how marketing works. Sometimes you really don't know why it worked. You're just really glad it did.

Aileen: Yeah, I kind of threw everything I could at it and then hopefully something sticks. Then you cross your fingers and like that's kind of marketing. You just try all the things.

Mindy: So talking about marketing, you started in 2013 with your first Alpha Girl book, so are there things that you did in 2013 that worked that you don't think would work today?

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Aileen: I don't know. I think everything that works then works today and I think there are actually more things that you can do now, In 2013 there weren't really Facebook ads, you couldn't do that. I use those now and get a lot of clicks through those. There's also Amazon ads here. Some people it works great for, but I actually don't get a great rate from the ads I spent on Amazon. There's not a lot of clicks. Not a lot of clicks to buy. You do get to see how many clicks lead to buys when you're doing an ad on Amazon, which is very interesting to see and you don't necessarily know that with your Facebook ads.

Aileen: I feel like there's lots more ways to to reach a reader now. Lots more marketing that you can do with like Instagram, which I don't know if it was around back then or if it was, it was maybe newer, but now it's, Instagram is such a huge influencer on what people are buying and what people are interested in and so Bookstagram and that kind of thing didn't exist back then, but it does now. So there's all these different ways that you can reach a reader. So I think that's not, there's not anything that worked then and wouldn't work now. I think now you've just got so many more options and ways to reach them, which is fantastic.

Mindy: I know from my own experience as a writer, that back when I was getting ready to prepub and people knew I had a book coming out that there was a lot more blogging going on, a lot more presence on blogs, a lot more readers for blogs and as a blogger - I have a blog that goes along with this podcast where I have interviews with published authors and feature, all kinds of different elements about publishing in the writing industry. I keep doing it, but my numbers are definitely not what they were like in 2011, 2012. That reading audience just really isn't there anymore. People want to smaller bites. They want the easily digestible social media posts. They don't want to sit and read your blog post. So do you still do blog tours or anything like that to promote newer books?

Aileen: I still do blog tours. I almost only do them for the content that then I can repost it on social media. It's just creation of content, you know, by doing these interviews and by doing these blog posts. And I have something else that I can post about on social media. So I don't know that it, that blog tours though are fantastic. They're not the bang for the buck that they used to be, but I still do them just so that I have that kind of content and daily new kind of thing that I can do leading up to a launch. I can say, oh, I did this interview, I have this other piece of content. Oh, there's this other thing that you can look at. Um, so I'm not ever posting like buy my book, buy my book, buy my book, because nobody wants that like hard sale pitch in their feed.

Aileen: I don't like it when somebody starts posting, buy my book, here's my book, here's my book. I would instantly unfollow, right? Hide. You know, I don't want to see that. I want to know more about like what they're doing, what their life is like, I want to know more about what their interviews are and that kind of thing. It's kind of changed a little bit. Blogs have kind of gone a little bit away, but you can still use that content as something else to post about that, will keep readers interested in knowing and seeing that there's a book coming out. Keep their curiosity piqued while you're trying to promote and not kind of be too pushy about your book.

Mindy: Last thing I want to ask you about when it comes to marketing is newsletters. Everyone has been saying for years you need to have one, you need to have one and a lot of people don't, or if they do, they're not doing it right. I was not doing it right for a long time and finally one of my friends sent me down and was like, Mindy, you're not doing this right. Ended up going out and actually learning how to do a newsletter and how to do it well and I restructured everything. I did some research just like you're supposed to do for anything you want to be successful at. So tell me about your newsletter, how you use it and what you use it for.

Aileen: I love the newsletter. Firm believer in it. I have different lists for my newsletter. Um, different people that I email. I have a separate like reviewer ones as I was talking about with the NetGalley list, which has helped get um, reviews early on in, in a release, which is key to getting it kind of kicked up in lists and bestseller lists. Those reviews really, really sell books. I can't tell you how many times I'm like, just put it on NetGalley. Get those emails, email them and say thank you for downloading. Please post a review. That's really key - keeping reader's attention to telling them like what's coming up, giving them a little peek into your personal life. Fun reasons to open the newsletter. I give them selective content. Put up a blog with like an excerpt for my newest book and only the people that open that newsletter will get the password exclusive content for the newsletter. Exclusive giveaways. Those kinds of things are really, really key for, for keeping those newsletter readers engaged and keep them opening and clicking. I'm kind of on the team - Yes, you need a newsletter. You should be getting emails, give them away, something for free to get their emails. Because once you have that reader and you have their information, you can keep them engaged, keep them interested.

Mindy: Now that I know how to do them right. Yes, I agree.

Aileen: Yeah. It takes a little bit of work and like trial and error. Oh, this one didn't open. Why not? What did I put in it that I put in the other one? So it's always like looking at it, being strategic with absolutely every marketing thing that you do. You have to be strategic with your releases, with your business, with your marketing, with your newsletters, everything. You have to be pretty strategic when you're doing it indie because nobody else is gonna do it for you.

Mindy: Last thing, what are you working on now? I know it's probably, uh, more in your Off Planet series, but tell us what you can about that and where listeners can find you online.

Aileen: Right now I'm working on Off Balance, which is yes, the sequel to Off Planet, it's going to be dual POV. So I'm really excited about that getting more Lorne in there, which readers had been asking me for it. I love to listen to what my readers are wanting. There was a high demand for Lorne in the next book so I added him in. Um, so I'm having fun with that right now and I'm also working on Alpha Erased, which is book nine of the Alpha Girl series and going back to Tessa, but to keep it interesting, I'm putting her mate, it's dual POV so she's actually going to get kidnapped and her memory wiped and so it's going to be Dastien winning her back all over again. So it'll be pretty romantic. I'm excited about that one. And you can find me online at AileenErin.com Or on Facebook and Instagram.

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Exploring Themes of Motherhood & Sisterhood in Fiction with Gillian McAllister

June 15, 2019 Mindy McGinnis

Today's guest is Gillian McAllister, a British author best known for her bestselling debut novel Everything But The Truth. Her new US release, The Good Sister, is an electrifying novel about the unyielding bond between two sisters, which is severely tested when one of them is accused of the worst imaginable crime.

Gillian joined me to talk about how her background in law helps illuminate her fiction, writing for the American audience, and how she explores themes of motherhood and sisterhood in her thrillers.

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Mindy: Welcome to Writer, Writer, Pants On Fire. Where authors talk about things that never happeend to people who don’t exist. We also talk craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing industry, marketing, and more. I'm your host Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at www.mindymcginnis.com and make sure to visit the Writer, Writer Pants On Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques, and more, at www.writerwriterpantsonfire.com If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit www.writerwriterpantsonfire.com and click support the blog and podcast in the sidebar.

Mindy: Today's guest is Gillian McAllister, a British author, best known for her best selling debut, Everything But The Truth. Her new US release, The Good Sister is an electrifying novel about the unyielding bond between two sisters, which is severely tested when one of them is accused of the worst imaginable crime. Gillian joined me today to talk about how her own background in law helps inform her fiction, writing for an American audience and how tapping into universal themes like motherhood and sisterhood were key to her newest release, The Good Sister.

Mindy: Your new book is called The Good Sister. It is about a sister who has to question everything she thinks she knows about her sibling after the death of her child. So if you could talk a little bit just about what the book is about so listeners can get a feel for what kind of read they're looking at here.

Gillian: Yes. So The Good Sister really is a character led family drama about two sisters, Martha, who is struggling to balance new brotherhood with being the CEO of a charity she's set up and Becky who she entrusts to look after the new baby while she has to work. Then the unthinkable happens and the book opens on the first day of Becky's trial for murder.

Mindy: And you are also a trained lawyer, which I'm sure was incredibly helpful to you while writing this book.

Gillian: Definitely I sort of was, although I wasn't a court lawyer, I was exposed to lots of different cases and I talked about them with lawyers and I was able to research things easily and I sort of know naturally the kind of language used in the law and in courtrooms. So yes, definitely it was a big help.

Mindy: And when it comes to writing courtroom scenes, I know just because in one of my own novels I had written a courtroom scene that I thought was just riveting and it set my plot perfectly in the way things pan out, was exactly what I was going for. And then I shared it with a friend of mine who was also an author and a lawyer who was like, yeah, this is great for fiction. He's like, what you wrote would never actually fly in a real courtroom.

Mindy: And the way you have your books set up is really smart structurally because we go back and forth between the past and some of the actions and the interactions between our characters and the actual courtroom scenes. So the vagaries of an actual court process can actually be really dry. A lot of the drama that we see on television and in movies and in books usually isn't the way it would actually go down. So if you could talk about that a little bit and how you kind of mediated the realities of a dry courtroom with the more tense and personal aspects of actual human interaction outside of the courtroom, for the purposes of your plot.

Gillian: Like you say, for every minute of drama we see, there's hours of adjournments and juries falling asleep and witnesses not showing up. And although I wanted it to be authentic with no sort of shouted objections and no sort of pacing lawyers. In Britain, the courtroom is a little more sedate but no less dramatic. Um, and I think in toning that down, I let the human relationships come to the fore and really the novel structure where you go back to the past and you also get little vignettes of each witness that was born out of like you say, I, I didn't want to write a closed set book that only took place in a courtroom and was just reams and reams and reams of questions. So in The Good Sister, as each witness takes the stand, you get that own chapter in their own voice at the time, what they saw. So you're sort of taken out of the courtroom, via their memories.

Mindy: And it works very well. I have to say there's a wonderful back and forth where the reader who doesn't know, of course, what actually happens on the day that the child passed away. Every chapter is leading you somewhere that you wouldn't expect, I would think.

Gillian: Yes, I think that's right. I hope there are a few sort of twists and turns and the reader really is focused on whether or not Becky did it. That is the central question that the novel answers. But it definitely, there were all sorts of red herrings and you know, other suspects and all that that you would expect from a thriller as well as a character led drama.

Mindy: So I want to talk just briefly about the fact that this is your first US release and because it does take place in a courtroom, and there are also other industries like health workers and people that are taking the stand that are speaking about things that they have noticed within the family. And it's not always using the same terminology that we use in the US and I noticed that as well in the courtroom scenes. You said yourself that in the British cart room that it's a little more restrained. The language is slightly different too. So I was just curious if you had any concerns about anything being lost in translation for a courtroom drama for a US audience.

Gillian: Yeah, I mean I think when you're published internationally, you always hope your fiction will translate well. Whether that is in sort of a different kind of English languages, the States has from the UK or actual literal translations into other foreign countries. I know that Putnam, my publisher at Penguin have used a lot of proofreaders so hopefully they have all sort of, well I know that they will understand it and I think really The Good Sister deals with themes that are universal. So I mean the courtroom is fairly similar that you have witnesses who get cross examined, you have juries, you have the defendant standing there, you have, whether she would have been granted bail or not. There's so many similarities between the British and the American legal system and, but really The Good Sister deals with themes of sort of the price of forgiveness and sisterhood and motherhood. And I think those really are truly universal.

Mindy: Absolutely. Yeah, they are. And I want to come back to motherhood, which you mentioned. I love how you portray motherhood and it's not all glowing skin and happiness. There are ugly parts to motherhood and you're drawing real women here, you're drawing the actual mother, but also a caretaker. And they're not always the picture of the idolized, happy, glowing mother that is so thrilled to be up at 3:00 AM holding their baby and staring into their face with great love. These are stressed women, these are modern women with modern concerns, but they are still the primary caretakers for an infant and an event and a toddler need constant care and support. So I really liked what you were doing, showing the stresses of motherhood and especially on a mother that is also working and trying to balance their lives. So if you could talk a little bit about that, what your goals were there, and also if you've had any, if you had any sort of concerns about portraying motherhood realistically.

Gillian: I mean, yeah, I think I always want to write real characters and not a single one of my characters is without flaws. They may not all be completely likable, but it was important to me that they would be real. Like you say, it would be easy to write a novel where somebody loses a child where they were in the idle of motherhood and they were loving 100% every moment of it. But I observed my friends and family who have had children and it just isn't the case. Of course, real life is just more complicated than that.

Gillian: And motherhood is, from what I can tell, being childless, it seems like a huge life upheaval and you suddenly have to prioritize somebody else when you've had maybe 30 years of prioritizing yourself. And I think it's both fascinating how sort of willingly people manage to do that. When to me it looks so difficult. Um, but also how complex their relationship it really is. And you've created another human and you've got that bond for life and there's nothing like it. So I really just wanted to use the crime as a vehicle to sort of explore that relationship and, and put pressure on it too.

Mindy: And the other thing you did that I thought was interesting, isn that we're not looking at a cherubic little baby that's always perfect and easy to take care of. None of them are. And I really appreciated that. Like you were showing a colicky baby. You're showing, you know, up in the middle of the night with a baby that won't stop crying and you can't figure out why to the point that it's like, you know, you're, you're understanding why some women do snap. Why that caretaker role is very much as you're saying, putting someone else first. You are second if not last in the consideration.

Gillian: Yes, totally. I noticed that that is a particular concern for women that some women feel that they do come last in the pecking order. Um, and you know, The Good Sister does definitely explore that hierarchy and that inequality that sometimes women do feel like the martyr of the family and you know, rightly so, in some circumstances. And it was important for me. I see so many crime novels where there is a family but the children just sort of run off, you know, off stage left during important plot moments.

Gillian: And really The Good Sister is about Layla the baby, and so I wanted to portray her as, even though she was eight weeks, as fully rounded. And I don't know a single person who has a baby who just sleeps in the corner all the time. So I didn't want to write a book where that happened either.

Mindy: Right, exactly. No, even the baby is a very real character, which is lovely. I want to ask about why the uh, main character, why did you have her as being the head of a nonprofit? I was curious about that choice for her employment.

Gillian: Well it was born out of a plot problem really, which I spoke to a lot of my friends and my sister who has children and I said, what would compel you to leave an eight week old overnight? And they, they really said family emergencies. Some women may feel comfortable doing that and some not. But I wanted Martha to have an exceptional reason because I knew that her likability would be in question. And I, you know that rightly or wrongly because men do leave their children, generally speaking. I don't want to gender stereotype, but maybe they leave them earlier than than women do. Men might go away for a night earlier. And part of that is biological. I really wanted Martha to have a cast iron reason for doing so because I didn't want the reader to not side with her. So really that was born out of a crime writers plotting problem.

Gillian: But then it opened up so many interesting questions about the greater good. And Martha's charity is dealing with children who are refugees and so they sort of arguably need her more than her own baby, or at least that's the way it works in Martha's hyper logical mind, although she obviously comes to regret it. And it actually sort of started a really interesting debate with myself about the morality of leaving your own child to care for other people's. Both Becky and Martha actually both do that.

Mindy: And you're totally right about it being a likeability problem for your reader because you do have to have sympathy on the side of, of Martha in order for the book to work. And it is an unfortunate truth that in our society, a mother that is leaving her young child is automatically going to have a strike against her. She has to have a very good reason for doing that

Gillian: In the same way that I turned the plot problem of the courtroom being kind of tedious in some ways into what I like best about the book - the witness vignettes - I have turned the plot problem of Martha's likability into something I explored and I actually, I began to address it in the text because I was thinking, well Scott was away that night too, which is Martha's husband. They both left the baby. But Martha is the culpable one in the eyes of society and the press and even the courtroom. And I actually then started to discuss that in the book because I just thought it was so interesting. I mean you see it all the time in the media, you know female sports people asked how, how they balance it with motherhood and men are much more rarely asked and that is something that women are beginning to question in the public eye, which is really brilliant. And it was sort of a way to explore that slight inequality that still exists.

Mindy: Yes, it absolutely does. Which brings me to Becky who is the sister who is trying to find a way to support herself and the child that she has but having a hard time finding her own path and knowing what she wants. So in some ways you have the same struggle going on with Becky where there's a career need while also being a parent. Her child is older, she has a son, but there is that question again because she is a parent and because she is focused on her own career of likability and of course we have the title of the book, The Good Sister. The assumption is that Martha is the good sister. Becky is the one that has less of a positive trajectory. She doesn't have all of the elements of an upstanding comfortable sort of life that Martha has. So if you want to talk a little bit about that, about the squaring off of the two characters kind of against each other, the way it is used in the court, but then also how the title plays into that.

Gillian: It was important for me to portray a kind of universal relationship and I think that the older in control, sensible sister versus the younger more volatile sister is such a universal thing and like not just in families but in romantic relationships. That sort of opposite pairing. Definitely. I see it all the time. That dynamic and I was really interested in, you know, if you've always known your younger sister had a little bit of a temper or she wasn't very good at holding a job down, how that looms really large when she's accused of a crime and all those fault lines in your relationship kind of become huge. And with The Good Sister I think. I mean ultimately that there is a strong thread of sibling rivalry running through the novel and I think each sister thinks the other is the good sister and in the conclusion they, I think they kind of come to a little bit of peace about that.

Mindy: The book is about so many things dealing with female relationships, the sister relationship, the relationship of mothers and also of course they have their own mother who is now in a way torn. Becky is staying with her and Martha is having to kind of juggle that whole idea herself where there is this strain within their family. What do the parents believe? Do they think that Becky did it? Are they on Becky's like quote unquote side? And the parents are trying to have to walk this line between what they should and shouldn't say, what they can even talk about to their own children when there is a court and a media circus around their interpersonal relationships

Gillian: The parents deserve their own novel don't they? It's such a fascinating kind of moral dilemma. Like what do you do if your child is accused of a crime but the victim is your other child? Um, and I think really they, they try and sort of play it even handedly between the two sisters. Even though part of Becky's bail conditions is that she resides with the parents. They don't take sides. But I think in doing so, both Becky and Martha find it frustrating. Um, but neither parent will kind of come down on one side. I don't know what the answer is in that situation. There is no right answer really. The family is sort of fractured and changed forever regardless of the outcome of the trial.

Mindy: Things are going to pass in between people that that can't be unsaid and can't be forgotten. When you're in a situation like that, it would change you regardless of the outcome. When you don't know what the outcome will be, you're going to be reacting honestly yet guardedly. What a tricky, tricky situation.

Gillian: No, exactly. And the parents don't know if Becky... Becky has no alternative explanation only that she didn't do it, which is not a very compelling defense. So I don't think they can do anything but wait and hope that the justice system will provide the truth, which it doesn't always. The justice system answers the question of whether there's enough evidence to convict, which is not the same as the truth.

Mindy: Very fine distinction. So talk to me a little bit more about Becky. She's also divorced, correct?

Gillian: She is separated, yes. She's not yet divorced. She's separated from her husband Mark. Yeah.

Mindy: That plays into then her character, the public assumption in the way that she is read because she is in some ways kind of judged for that. She has a failed relationship. And then we have Martha, who of course is in a marriage- outwardly happy marriage. Again, it plays into the assumptions that people make about, especially women in a situation where they are separated or divorced or there is some sort of non harmonious romantic relationship. And even though the separation is amicable yet perception is that something has gone horribly wrong and that she, Becky is the one that carries the responsibility for that.

Gillian: Yeah. I mean I think I wanted to probe the sort of notion that Martha really has it all. She's a CEO of a charity, so she's a working mother. She, she had a baby a couple of years into marriage. Um, she sort of did it all in the traditional way, whereas Becky got pregnant, I think she was 19. She'd just gone to university so she dropped out and then she's a single mom and she's never really held a job down. But actually if you look at who's happier - taking out the tragedy - Becky sort of says in in one of the flashback scenes where she's still with Mark when they were hanging the wallpaper in anticipation of their baby being born. She actually said, I shouldn't be happy at 19 and pregnant and dropped out of university, but I'm so happy with this man. And I think it's so interesting the sort of stories we tell ourselves about how our life has to appear to the outside world versus the messy truth with it and where you can be completely happy within chaos.

Mindy: And chaos is a good word for Becky's life. I particularly like her opening scene where she is running around trying to acquire a particular print of fabric for a chair that is needed for a TV set and they need it tomorrow. And so she's running around just insanely trying to make things come together and she's stressed and she's upset and she's calling Martha and saying, I can't believe my life. It's ridiculous. But at the same time, even though she does end up leaving that life, she's kind of thriving on it. She does enjoy it to a degree. It just becomes too much.

Gillian: Exactly. She, she thrives on adrenaline or drama if you, if you want to kind of be slightly more judgmental about it. But Becky would tell you that she's a failure and she, oh, she can't secure the right sets for her job and she needs Martha's support. But actually what Becky can't see is that she's so resourceful. She found the zebra print at 11 o'clock at night. She found the chair, she went home and covered it. And Becky's real problem of her own self esteem and her own self perception. And I think Becky's great if only Becky could see it. I have a lot of sympathy for that character. I think she's my favorite character I've ever written.

Mindy: Yeah. Oh Becky is fascinating and so much fun to read about. I think what you're saying about the problem of self esteem is also true of Martha to a degree.

Gillian: Yeah. And in some ways that's why the title, I think it's quite good because they both think the other is the good sister and neither of them can see that own qualities. And because they're so opposite, they wish they were the other. But if only they could sort of see that they're perfectly adequate themselves.

Mindy: And that's kind of true of all women I would assume. I mean, unfortunately part of society, how this works is that we're always measuring ourselves against one another, be it a sibling or a friend or even an enemy. We're trying to figure out who is better looking, who is more successful, who has the more uh, attractive spouse or the more successful spouse, whose children are smarter. Like all of those things. We weigh those against one another and it all ends up being about you and whether you have succeeded or failed as a woman and a mother and a wife and all of the different hats that women have to wear.

Gillian: Exactly. And particularly, you know, with the modern invention of social media, I think we do constantly compare our, our interior to peoples exterior, when actually it just, it makes us all kind of feel bad about ourselves really. So I was kind of, I was also writing about that like you know, comparison is the thief of joy and all of that.

Mindy: Either we suffer by comparison or even if we are quote unquote winning at the comparison. I think especially as women because we're always taught to be nice and kind, we then judge ourselves for comparing in the first place.

Gillian: There's no joy really in winning a competition that you've set up because you feel insecure. And I think the, the healthy mental health point to get to is the point where you just please yourself and when we talk about, you know, wanting to appear like you have it all or whatever, I think is like the kind of comeback to that is, well, in whose judgment? Because everybody will have a different idea of the perfect life and really you can only please yourself. That's definitely the way to wisdom whether or not any of us achieve that is another question.

Mindy: Very true. All right. Anything lastly that you want to say about the book or anything related to the characters or your writing process for it?

Gillian: Well, I just really hope people enjoy it. You know, I'm a UK bestseller and this is my American debut and it's, it's such a privilege to have an access to such a wide audience and I'm just, I'm thrilled and I really hope people enjoy it. And if they want to get in touch with me, I'm on Twitter as at GillianMAuthor and Instagram, actually as GillianMAuthor and on Facebook as Gillian McAllister, author.

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